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Category: Computers

If you search on flickr for the tag whatsinyourbag you get an array of what people carry around with them in their gadget bags. I thought I’d post one myself, so here’s a picture of everything that goes into my gadget bag (if you click on the picture, you can see an annotated version describing what everything is). Basically, I carry almost an entire office around with me, no scanner or printer, but pretty much everything else is there. I didn’t realize just how much was in my bag until I dumped it all out to try to catalog it!Seen on Gizmodo

Well, I’ve been playing a bit more with the template. You may notice that the webcam shot at the top of the menu is sometimes a live shot, updating every 30 seconds (depends on whether I’ve got the cam on or not). If it’s live, it’ll say “Live” underneath the picture. Another change is the picture behind the banner, it’s now a random one of sixteen pictures (there will probably be more later), taken by me from various locations. If anybody is interested in the code to do the random pic, let me know, it’s pretty simple php combined with css (we won’t even talk about what it took to get a drop shadow using css…). The webcam is a bit more complicated, but just uses javascript to trigger a reload of the image every 30 seconds. Finally, the page is set to auto-refresh every 30 minutes, this is to catch the case when the webcam is turned on or off while you’re viewing the page. I’m working on a better solution, but it isn’t there yet.

I love Spam Karma, a WordPress plugin for blocking comment spam, it also handles trackback spam to a certain extent. I’ve had it installed for quite a while and it’s done a wonderful job of blocking comment spam and I don’t think I’ve seen any false positives. In general, it catches most of the spam before I ever see it for moderation, so it’s quite nice in that respect.

udev is the new user space device manager in Linux 2.6. It has a lot of cool features, one of which is the ability to run a script when a device is added or removed. It can also let you assign a fixed device name to a hot-pluggable device (say, oh, a Palm Pilot). By combining these features, you can setup a Linux system to do a Palm hotsync automagically when the hotsync button is pressed on the cradle. Obviously, this is only useful if you have a single user with a Palm Pilot using the computer. It may be possible to make it work for multiple users, however, that’s beyond the scope of this post.Continue reading Stupid udev tricks

So, it’s payday, and I’m wandering through BJ’s (a local warehouse club) buying a few bulk staples when my eyes lit upon an Averatec 3250H1 laptop. And what’s this? Price reduced? $750? Let’s just say it followed me home and I decided to keep it. Besides, it’s my birthday. Anyway, what I really wanted it for was a nice Linux laptop, so I took it home and got started.Continue reading Averatec 3250H1 and Linux